This is old news, from February.

A Google search on pfizer moderna studies placebo doesn’t turn up much of anything beyond similar articles. I wonder if the close scrutiny of the vaccines in the months following have been enough to allay concerns?

A lot of the early study members were physicians and health care workers, so this doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

A pulmonologist I know that was in the Moderna study was offered a vaccine from their employer back in December. They tried to get urgently deblinded (this was after the primary study was done but before deblinding) so they could ensure the doses didn’t go to waste. This ended up being a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare, and they weren’t able to find out the answer until a few hours before their scheduled appointment. They had in fact been in the treatment group, so the dose was fortunately redirected to another healthcare worker.

Why not use unvaccinated people from the general population?

There would be some selection bias, but it's going to be irrelevant for most things.

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> Perhaps in a year or two the existing vaccines will have proven so effective that COVID-19 becomes not much more than a nuisance.

This sentence won't age well.

truly, a problem you want to have.